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25 Aug 08:26

Nicki Minaj Tweets 'Be Humble' After Taylor Swift Drops 'Look What You Made Me Do'

by Just Jared
Nicki Minaj Tweets 'Be Humble' After Taylor Swift Drops 'Look What You Made Me Do'

Has the Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift feud been reignited?

Shortly after the 27-year-old pop star released “Look What You Made Me Do,” the 34-year-old rapper took to Twitter to tweet “N—a sit down. Be humble” and fans are assuming it’s about Taylor.

Nicki
and Taylor have had their issues in the past. Back in 2015, Nicki voiced her frustration about her song “Anaconda” not being nominated for Video of the Year at the VMAs and said, “If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year.”

Taylor – whose “Bad Blood” video was nominated and won – fired back, saying, “I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot.”

The two seemingly put the drama behind them and performed on stage together that same year.

Nicki
was also just featured on Katy Perry‘s “Swish Swish” diss track about Taylor.

05 Dec 20:59

Susan Orlean on the Strange Serendipities That Shape Our Lives

by Maria Popova

How the roads taken and not taken both lead us to ourselves.


Susan Orlean on the Strange Serendipities That Shape Our Lives

“The exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are,” Adam Phillips wrote in his magnificent meditation on the value of our unlived lives. Every life is a testament to these exemptions, each of us a Venn diagram in which the possible and probable form the slim overlap of our personhood.

I spent the summer before my fourteenth birthday like all academically ambitious Bulgarian kids did — applying to the country’s elite foreign-language high schools, the most popular of which were the English, German, and French gymnasia, and the most competitive and prestigious the American College of Sofia (which was, despite its name, a high school). Each prepared its pupils for higher education in the respective country of the language taught, so that most German high school graduates went to university in Germany, most ACS graduates in America, and so forth.

High school entrance exams in Bulgaria were brutal and kids spent months — sometimes years — preparing, with entire tutoring and testing industries dedicated to the process. All the major language schools had a single general entrance exam — if you got in at all, based on your score relative to the national bell curve, you could enroll into your first, second, or third choice. The only exception was the American College, which had its own special exam, admitting only fifty girls and fifty boys from the whole country.

Having gone to an intensely competitive mathematics middle school, I decided I wanted to go to the German school — in part because it had the strongest curriculum in mathematics, and in part as an act of allegiance to my father, who speaks four languages but is unambiguously a Germanophile.

My middle-school best friend, Yoanna, had her heart set on ACS, with the German school as her second choice — so she had to take both exams and persuaded me to accompany her to ACS one for moral support. She had spent a year and a half preparing for it and I, none — all my preparation had gone into the general exam, which had taken place earlier that month.

I walked out of the ACS exam — a standardized test and an essay — certain that I had flunked it, but unconcerned since I never cared to get in.

A couple of weeks later, the results from the general exam came in — I had placed in the top 1%, as had Yoanna, which meant that I could enroll into the German school as I had hoped and she had her second choice secured.

Later that week, with the results from the ACS exam yet to come, Yoanna and I left for summer camp with our middle school class — a festive two-week farewell at the Black Sea coast, on the other side of the country. But the most thrilling part was that the boy on whom I had the maddest teenage crush all year was also coming — a point of excitement about which I had enthused at length during the many hours Yoanna and I spent on the phone in the weeks leading up to camp.

After an eight-hour train journey, we arrived at the coast, high on vacation elation, post-exam relief, and teenage hormones. This was an era before cell phones, so every afternoon Yoanna and I made a trip to a nearby payphone to call our mothers and check in on the ACS admission results. And every afternoon we were told that the results were not yet in. One day, I couldn’t find Yoanna, so I went to the payphone alone. My mother was out, but her secretary answered and enthusiastically informed me that I had gotten into ACS, placing third out of the entire national applicant pool. Certain that I had done woefully on the exam, I instantly concluded she had misunderstood. Making nothing of it, I decided to return later and speak with my mother directly.

When I got back to the room Yoanna and I shared with eight other girls, I found her sprawled on her cot, sobbing — the kind of violent teenage tears for which there is neither consolation nor comfort. I knew instantly that she had spoken to her mother and found out that she hadn’t gotten in. I spent the rest of the evening trying to console her and we eventually made a pact to go to the German school together — it was her second choice, but the silver lining of continuing our friendship through high school seemed a decent comfort. When I finally reached my mother later, she confirmed what her secretary had said and urged me to consider enrolling — it was, after all, the best school in the country. But I was adamant — I was going to the German school with Yoanna.

The following day, on my way back to the room from our final dinner at camp before our evening departure, I spotted Yoanna behind the camp building, making out with my crush under a street lamp. My heart plummeted to my heels. I said nothing and just stood there in disbelief. Eventually, I went back to the room, packed the two giant suitcases I had stuffed with two weeks’ worth of teenage-girl vanities, and made my way to the train station in silence.

I have no recollection of where Yoanna was during the eight-hour overnight train ride, whether or not we talked, and what was said. All I remember is leaping off the train as soon as it pulled into station in the morning and running toward my mother, dragging the two enormous suitcases with a kind of Herculean fury, yelling: “To the car, to the car! We have twenty minutes!”

My mother was thoroughly confused, but indulged me, grabbing one of the suitcases and rushing to the car as I explained that the enrollment deadline for ACS closed at 9am that morning. It was 8:40am and we had to make it to the other side of town. I said nothing about the Yoanna incident, and my mother didn’t ask why I had changed my mind — she must have simply been relieved that I had decided to attend the school she considered the best choice.

An excellent driver, she navigated rush hour traffic with admirable deftness and questionable legality. We pulled into the ACS parking lot at 8:56am and I sprinted to the guard’s booth to get a sign-in time stamp before the cutoff. I must have looked deranged — disheveled from a redeye train trip, ablaze with a teenager’s rage and a manic determination. But I made the deadline — and so the rest of my life was set into motion.

Had Yoanna not made out with the boy, had the train been delayed by four minutes, had my mother gotten pulled over for running a red light, had any of the innumerable elements in this Rube Goldberg machine of chance-choices been different, I would be living in a different part of the world, reading and writing and thinking in a different language, dreaming different dreams, loving different people. There would be no Brain Pickings.

That strange Rube Goldberg machine is what the inimitable Susan Orlean explores in her beautiful contribution to Airmail: Women of Letters (public library) — an international compendium of pieces from the Australia’s wonderful literary salon Women of Letters, co-curated by Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire.

Susan Orlean (Photograph: Kelly Davidson)
Susan Orlean (Photograph: Kelly Davidson)

Orlean recounts inheriting her grandmother’s Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition — a bulky, outdated volume she was about to discard. But in leafing through it one last time, she came upon a small yet significant astonishment somewhere between Luna Cornea and lustless — a pressed four-leaf clover:

All of its leaves were facing upward, and its long stem was curved into a lazy ‘J’. The clover was still green, or at least greenish, and the leaves were dry and perfectly flat, but hardy and well-attached to the stem. A little stain of clover juice was printed onto the pages it had been pressed between.

The clover became a sort of speculative second-person time machine for Orlean as she came to wonder about the particulars of her grandmother’s life — where she was when she found it, who she was with, why she put it between these two specific pages, whether she looked at it frequently or forgot about it entirely. And out of those questions sprang a newfound intimacy across space and time:

It was the first time I had such a distinct sense of my grandmother. I could imagine her as I’d never actually known her, a sense of her as a young woman with the time and patience to sort through blades of grass, looking for four leaves on a clover, believing in the luck one might bring her. And I believed I was lucky, too, having been so close to losing it, to discarding it, to never knowing what I had in my hands.

But the clover also awakened another, larger intimacy — not with the happenings of a particular life but with the happenstances of which every life is woven. Orlean writes:

That moment, with my inherited dictionary, was the first time I really took stock of the strange serendipity that life is, the near misses and the surprise encounters and the accidents that make up who we are and what we know. My life wasn’t changed dramatically by finding that clover. I didn’t find, say, a lottery ticket, or a priceless diamond she had tucked away for a rainy day. What I found was something both awe-inspiring and slightly disconcerting — the idea that life is a bit of a wild animal that will not be tamed or managed. Or maybe life isn’t really like a wild animal. Maybe it’s a maze, full of turns taken and not taken, and you will never know what would have happened if you chose one rather than the other way to go. You only have what you did choose.

For the first time, I took the measure of luck when I found that clover, because it was such a small incident that could have so easily not happened, and honestly, I was shaken up realizing that the way my life turned out was just a series of tiny, incremental bits of chance and choice. That night, I lay in bed unwinding everything I really am happy about, and saw how many accidents had played into them. What if I hadn’t answered the phone that morning ten years ago and hadn’t ever had that conversation in which a friend told me that she wanted to fix me up with someone, and then I might have never met my husband? What if I hadn’t forgotten to register for the law boards and ended up taking them and going to law school and being a lawyer rather than a writer? What if I hadn’t found that discarded newspaper and hadn’t read the article about an orchid thief and hadn’t decided to write about it? What if I ran that red light? What if the boyfriend who perhaps gave my grandmother that clover had won her over, and she’d married him instead of the man she did marry, and everything, everything, would be different, because my mother wouldn’t have been the girl she was, and I wouldn’t be who I am?

[…]

This is the sort of thing that keeps me awake at night.

And then I realize that luck, and fate, happen how they’re going to happen, and that the missed connection and the accidental encounter align in some sort of cosmic balance, and things are what they are. That helps me fall asleep.

Airmail is a terrific read in its entirety, featuring contributions by Tavi Gevinson, Lev Grossman, and Moby. For more of Orlean’s genius, see her advice on writing.


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30 Oct 18:08

Katie Holmes Will Discuss Scientology, Leah Remini on '20/20'

by Just Jared
Katie Holmes Will Discuss Scientology, Leah Remini on '20/20'

Katie Holmes is set to discuss Scientology and ex-Scientologist Leah Remini on a highly anticipated 20/20 special set to air tonight (October 30) on ABC.

The special will follow Leah‘s exit from the church and one of the topics that is discussed is how she got “written up” by the church for saying something negative about Katie and ex-husband Tom Cruise.

Leah was invited to Tom‘s home to teach him salsa dancing and when she showed up she was greeted by the actor, Katie, and two high-ranking Scientology officials.

“He was like, forcibly kissing Katie,” Leah said. “And I said, ‘Hey, get a freaking room.’ And uh, well. I was written up for that.”

“You can assume if you say something that is critical to the church, you will be written up,” she added. She also said that “being critical of Tom Cruise is being critical of Scientology itself.”


Leah Remini’s 20/20 Interview Preview
05 Jul 23:12

From a 1960 letter, Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand. (via)



From a 1960 letter, Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand. (via)

30 Sep 00:37

TULIP Summary

by John Samson

Sproul01

In a series of blog articles at ligonier.org entitled "TULIP and Reformed Theology," Dr. R. C. Sproul provided a brief summary of the five points of Calvinism (also known as the Doctrines of Grace) expressed in the acrostic TULIP:

INTRODUCTION
Just a few years before the Pilgrims landed on the shores of New England in the Mayflower, a controversy erupted in the Netherlands and spread throughout Europe and then around the world. It began within the theological faculty of a Dutch institution that was committed to Calvinistic teaching. Some of the professors there began to have second thoughts about issues relating to the doctrines of election and predestination. As this theological controversy spread across the country, it upset the church and theologians of the day. Finally, a synod was convened. Issues were squared away and the views of certain people were rejected, including those of a man by the name of Jacobus Arminius.

The group that led the movement against orthodox Reformed theology was called the Remonstrants. They were called the Remonstrants because they were remonstrating or protesting against certain doctrines within their own theological heritage. There were basically five doctrines that were the core of the controversy. As a result of this debate, these five core theological issues became known in subsequent generations as the “five points of Calvinism.” They are now known through the very popular acrostic TULIP, which is a clever way to sum up the five articles that were in dispute. The five points, as they are stated in order to form the acrostic TULIP, are: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.

I mention this historical event because it would be a serious mistake to understand the essence of Reformed theology simply in light of these five doctrines—the Reformed faith involves many other elements of theological and ecclesiastical confession. However, these are the five controversial points of Reformed theology, and they are the ones that are popularly seen as distinctive to this particular confession. Over the next five posts, we are going to spend some time looking at these five points of Calvinism as they are spelled out in the acrostic TULIP.

TOTAL DEPRAVITY
The doctrine of total depravity reflects the Reformed viewpoint of original sin. That term—original sin—is often misunderstood in the popular arena. Some people assume that the term original sin must refer to the first sin—the original transgression that we’ve all copied in many different ways in our own lives, that is, the first sin of Adam and Eve. But that’s not what original sin has referred to historically in the church. Rather, the doctrine of original sin defines the consequences to the human race because of that first sin.

Virtually every church historically that has a creed or a confession has agreed that something very serious happened to the human race as a result of the first sin—that first sin resulted in original sin. That is, as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve, the entire human race fell, and our nature as human beings since the fall has been influenced by the power of evil. As David declared in the Old Testament, “Oh, God, I was born in sin, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps. 51:5). He was not saying that it was sinful for his mother to have borne children; neither was he saying that he had done something evil by being born. Rather, he was acknowledging the human condition of fallenness—that condition that was part of the experience of his parents, a condition that he himself brought into this world. Therefore, original sin has to do with the fallen nature of mankind. The idea is that we are not sinners because we sin, but that we sin because we are sinners.

In the Reformed tradition, total depravity does not mean utter depravity. We often use the term total as a synonym for utter or for completely, so the notion of total depravity conjures up the idea that every human being is as bad as that person could possibly be. You might think of an archfiend of history such as Adolf Hitler and say there was absolutely no redeeming virtue in the man, but I suspect that he had some affection for his mother. As wicked as Hitler was, we can still conceive of ways in which he could have been even more wicked than he actually was. So the idea of totalin total depravity doesn’t mean that all human beings are as wicked as they can possibly be. It means that the fall was so serious that it affects the whole person. The fallenness that captures and grips our human nature affects our bodies; that’s why we become ill and die. It affects our minds and our thinking; we still have the capacity to think, but the Bible says the mind has become darkened and weakened. The will of man is no longer in its pristine state of moral power. The will, according to the New Testament, is now in bondage. We are enslaved to the evil impulses and desires of our hearts. The body, the mind, the will, the spirit—indeed, the whole person—have been infected by the power of sin.

I like to replace the term total depravity with my favorite designation, which is radical corruption. Ironically, the word radical has its roots in the Latin word for “root,” which is radix, and it can be translated root or core. The term radical has to do with something that permeates to the core of a thing. It’s not something that is tangential or superficial, lying on the surface. The Reformed view is that the effects of the fall extend or penetrate to the core of our being. Even the English word core actually comes from the Latin word cor, which means “heart.” That is, our sin is something that comes from our hearts. In biblical terms, that means it’s from the core or very center of our existence.

So what is required for us to be conformed to the image of Christ is not simply some small adjustments or behavioral modifications, but nothing less than renovation from the inside. We need to be regenerated, to be made over again, to be quickened by the power of the Spirit. The only way in which a person can escape this radical situation is by the Holy Spirit’s changing the core, the heart. However, even that change does not instantly vanquish sin. The complete elimination of sin awaits our glorification in heaven.

UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION
The Reformed view of election, known as unconditional election, means that God does not foresee an action or condition on our part that induces Him to save us. Rather, election rests on God’s sovereign decision to save whomever He is pleased to save.

In the book of Romans, we find a discussion of this difficult concept. Romans 9:10–13 reads: “And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls—she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’ As it is written, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’” Here the Apostle Paul is giving his exposition of the doctrine of election. He deals with it significantly in Romans 8, but here he illustrates his teaching of the doctrine of election by going back into the past of the Jewish people and looking at the circumstances surrounding the birth of twins—Jacob and Esau. In the ancient world, it was customary for the firstborn son to receive the inheritance or the patriarchal blessing. However, in the case of these twins, God reversed the process and gave the blessing not to the elder but to the younger. The point that the Apostle labors here is that God not only makes this decision prior to the twins’ births, He does it without a view to anything they would do, either good or evil, so that the purposes of God might stand. Therefore, our salvation does not rest on us; it rests solely on the gracious, sovereign decision of God.

This doesn’t mean that God will save people whether they come to faith or not. There are conditions that God decrees for salvation, not the least of which is putting one’s personal trust in Christ. However, that is a condition for justification, and the doctrine of election is something else. When we’re talking about unconditional election, we’re talking in a very narrow confine of the doctrine of election itself.

So, then, on what basis does God elect to save certain people? Is it on the basis of some foreseen reaction, response, or activity of the elect? Many people who have a doctrine of election or predestination look at it this way. They believe that in eternity past God looked down through the corridors of time and He knew in advance who would say yes to the offer of the gospel and who would say no. On the basis of this prior knowledge of those who will meet the condition for salvation—that is, expressing faith or belief in Christ—He elects to save them. This is conditional election, which means that God distributes His electing grace on the basis of some foreseen condition that human beings meet themselves.

Unconditional election is another term that I think can be a bit misleading, so I prefer to use the term sovereign election. If God chooses sovereignly to bestow His grace on some sinners and withhold His grace from other sinners, is there any violation of justice in this? Do those who do not receive this gift receive something they do not deserve? Of course not. If God allows these sinners to perish, is He treating them unjustly? Of course not. One group receives grace; the other receives justice. No one receives injustice. Paul anticipates this protest: “Is there injustice on God’s part?” (Rom. 9:14a). He answers it with the most emphatic response he can muster. I prefer the translation, “God forbid” (v. 14b). Then he goes on to amplify this response: “For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion’” (v. 15). Here the Apostle is reminding his reader of what Moses declared centuries before; namely, that it is God’s divine right to execute clemency when and where He desires. He says from the beginning, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.” It is not on those who meet some conditions, but on those whom He is pleased to bestow the benefit.

LIMITED ATONEMENT
I think that of all the five points of Calvinism, limited atonement is the most controversial, and the one that engenders perhaps the most confusion and consternation. This doctrine is chiefly concerned about the original purpose, plan, or design of God in sending Christ into the world to die on the cross. Was it the Father’s intent to send His Son to die on the cross to make salvation possible for everyone, but with the possibility that His death would be effective for no one? That is, did God simply send Christ to the cross to make salvation possible, or did God, from all eternity, have a plan of salvation by which, according to the riches of His grace and His eternal election, He designed the atonement to ensure the salvation of His people? Was the atonement limited in its original design?

I prefer not to use the term limited atonement because it is misleading. I rather speak of definite redemption or definite atonement, which communicates that God the Father designed the work of redemption specifically with a view to providing salvation for the elect, and that Christ died for His sheep and laid down His life for those the Father had given to Him.

One of the texts that we often hear used as an objection against the idea of a definite atonement is 2 Peter 3:8–9: “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” The immediate antecedent of the word any in this passage is the word us, and I think it’s perfectly clear that Peter is saying that God is not willing that any of us should perish, but that all of us should come to salvation. He’s not speaking of all mankind indiscriminately; the us is a reference to the believing people to whom Peter is speaking. I don’t think we want to believe in a God who sends Christ to die on the cross and then crosses His fingers, hoping that someone will take advantage of that atoning death. Our view of God is different. Our view is that the redemption of specific sinners was an eternal plan of God, and this plan and design was perfectly conceived and perfectly executed so that the will of God to save His people is accomplished by the atoning work of Christ.

This does not mean that a limit is placed on the value or the merit of the atonement of Jesus Christ. It’s traditional to say that the atoning work of Christ is sufficient for all. That is, its meritorious value is sufficient to cover the sins of all people, and certainly anyone who puts his or her trust in Jesus Christ will receive the full measure of the benefits of that atonement. It is also important to understand that the gospel is to be preached universally. This is another controversial point, because on the one hand the gospel is offered universally to all who are within earshot of the preaching of it, but it’s not universally offered in the sense that it’s offered to anyone without any conditions. It’s offered to anyone who believes. It’s offered to anyone who repents. Obviously the merit of the atonement of Christ is given to all who believe and to all who repent of their sins.

IRRESISTIBLE GRACE
In historic Reformation thought, the notion is this: regeneration precedes faith. We also believe that regeneration is monergistic. Now that’s a three-dollar word. It means essentially that the divine operation called rebirth or regeneration is the work of God alone. An erg is a unit of labor, a unit of work. The word energy comes from that idea. The prefix mono- means “one.” So monergism means “one working.” It means that the work of regeneration in the human heart is something that God does by His power alone—not by 50 percent His power and 50 percent man’s power, or even 99 percent His power and 1 percent man’s power. It is 100 percent the work of God. He, and He alone, has the power to change the disposition of the soul and the human heart to bring us to faith.

In addition, when He exercises this grace in the soul, He brings about the effect that He intends to bring about. When God created you, He brought you into existence. You didn’t help Him. It was His sovereign work that brought you to life biologically. Likewise, it is His work, and His alone, that brings you into the state of rebirth and of renewed creation. Hence, we call this irresistible grace. It’s grace that works. It’s grace that brings about what God wants it to bring about. If, indeed, we are dead in sins and trespasses, if, indeed, our wills are held captive by the lusts of our flesh and we need to be liberated from our flesh in order to be saved, then in the final analysis, salvation must be something that God does in us and for us, not something that we in any way do for ourselves.

However, the idea of irresistibility conjures up the idea that one cannot possibly offer any resistance to the grace of God. However, the history of the human race is the history of relentless resistance to the sweetness of the grace of God. Irresistible grace does not mean that God’s grace is incapable of being resisted. Indeed, we are capable of resisting God’s grace, and we do resist it. The idea is that God’s grace is so powerful that it has the capacity to overcome our natural resistance to it. It is not that the Holy Spirit drags people kicking and screaming to Christ against their wills. The Holy Spirit changes the inclination and disposition of our wills, so that whereas we were previously unwilling to embrace Christ, now we are willing, and more than willing. Indeed, we aren’t dragged to Christ, we run to Christ, and we embrace Him joyfully because the Spirit has changed our hearts. They are no longer hearts of stone that are impervious to the commands of God and to the invitations of the gospel. God melts the hardness of our hearts when He makes us new creatures. The Holy Spirit resurrects us from spiritual death, so that we come to Christ because we want to come to Christ. The reason we want to come to Christ is because God has already done a work of grace in our souls. Without that work, we would never have any desire to come to Christ. That’s why we say that regeneration precedes faith.

I have a little bit of a problem using the term irresistible grace, not because I don’t believe this classical doctrine, but because it is misleading to many people. Therefore, I prefer the term effectual grace, because the irresistible grace of God effects what God intends it to effect.

PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS
Writing to the Philippians, Paul says, “He who has begun a good work in you will perfect it to the end” (Phil. 1:6). Therein is the promise of God that what He starts in our souls, He intends to finish. So the old axiom in Reformed theology about the perseverance of the saints is this: If you have it—that is, if you have genuine faith and are in a state of saving grace—you will never lose it. If you lose it, you never had it.

We know that many people make professions of faith, then turn away and repudiate or recant those professions. The Apostle John notes that there were those who left the company of the disciples, and he says of them, “Those who went out from us were never really with us” (1 John 2:19). Of course, they were with the disciples in terms of outward appearances before they departed. They had made an outward profession of faith, and Jesus makes it clear that it is possible for a person to do this even when he doesn’t possess what he’s professing. Jesus says, “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me” (Matt. 15:8). Jesus even warns at the end of the Sermon on the Mount that at the last day, many will come to Him, saying: “Lord, Lord, didn’t we do this in your name? Didn’t we do that in your name?” He will send them away, saying: “Depart from Me, you workers of iniquity. I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23). He will not say: “I knew you for a season and then you went sour and betrayed Me. No, you never were part of My invisible church.” The whole purpose of God’s election is to bring His people safely to heaven; therefore, what He starts He promises to finish. He not only initiates the Christian life, but the Holy Spirit is with us as the sanctifier, the convictor, and the helper to ensure our preservation.

I want to stress that this endurance in the faith does not rest on our strength. Even after we’re regenerated, we still lapse into sin, even serious sin. We say that it is possible for a Christian to experience a very serious fall, we talk about backsliding, we talk about moral lapses, and so on. I can’t think of any sin, other than blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, that a truly converted Christian is not capable of committing.

We look, for example, at the model of David in the Old Testament. David was surely a man after God’s own heart. He was certainly a regenerate man. He had the Spirit of God in Him. He had a profound and passionate love for the things of God. Yet this man not only committed adultery but also was involved in a conspiracy to have his lover’s husband killed in war—which was really conspiracy to murder. That’s serious business. Even though we see the serious level of repentance to which David was brought as a result of the words of the prophet Nathan to him, the point is that David fell, and he fell seriously.

The apostle Paul warns us against having a puffed-up view of our own spiritual strength. He says, “Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12). We do fall into very serious activities. The Apostle Peter, even after being forewarned, rejected Christ, swearing that he never knew Him—a public betrayal of Jesus. He committed treason against His Lord. When he was being warned of this eventuality, Peter said it would never happen. Jesus said, “Simon, Simon, Satan would have you and sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you, so that when you turn, strengthen the brothers” (Luke 22:31).Peter fell, but he returned. He was restored. His fall was for a season. That’s why we say that true Christians can have radical and serious falls but never total and final falls from grace.

I think this little catchphrase, perseverance of the saints, is dangerously misleading. It suggests that the perseverance is something that we do, perhaps in and of ourselves. I believe that saints do persevere in faith, and that those who have been effectually called by God and have been reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit endure to the end. However, they persevere not because they are so diligent in making use of the mercies of God. The only reason we can give why any of us continue on in the faith is because we have been preserved. So I prefer the term the preservation of the saints, because the process by which we are kept in a state of grace is something that is accomplished by God. My confidence in my preservation is not in my ability to persevere. My confidence rests in the power of Christ to sustain me with His grace and by the power of His intercession. He is going to bring us safely home.